“The Los Angeles Olympics is a global shame. Nobody can tell me it’s not. We were prepared for the Olympics; Václav Vochozka and I wanted to win our third medal at our third Olympics, a feat few have achieved. Then, as we were about to end our preparation, having completed a camp, we got a raw deal. I commuted from Litoměřice to Prague for training for twenty years and was used to seeing everybody in their boats already when I arrived. I came to the Dukla clubhouse, went down – and I saw a beer keg and everyone was drinking. I go: ‘What’s up? Are you crazy? I mean, we’re going to the Olympics…?’ – ‘You know, we’re not going anywhere – Russians scrapped it all for us.’ Sadly, they did that to an entire generation of successful Czechoslovak sportspeople, light athletes and everyone – Bugár, Fibingerová, us rowers... Such a chance will never come again.”
“We went there as a quadruple scull and made it to the finals. We faced Russians on one side and East Germans on the other, which was… We didn’t like it. I was the stroke then, meaning I was at the front and everybody else did what I did, following me. It was our first Olympics and we had to pay our ‘newbie dues’ so to speak. I was nervous, and as I started, I made a mistake. We had to turn and go back to the start; one more mess-up like that and the Olympics would be over for us. I was really careful. We started successfully, and when we were one kilometre into the race, we were about even with the Germans and the Russians. Vašek Vochozka sat behind me, and suddenly a wave knocked the oar out of his hand. It happens sometimes. He had to find it and we lost the contact. Eventually, we came in third and I think that was the best we could do at first try. In addition, the medal is really beautiful, on a beautiful chain, and as they decorated us, they gave us a seedling of a genuine Canadian maple tree. You can still see it at the rowers’ isle in Litoměřice, and it bears our names: Pecka, Vochozka, Lacina, Hellebrand.”
“I grabbed a copy of Stadion and browsed through it. I saw an interview with Jeriová on one page and Blanka Paulů on the next. The questions the reporter asked them were not about sports – he asked them about their idea of life tomorrow and on. I read that and found that even if I had her talent, I couldn’t write it better than Květa did. I took interest in it. Then we went to Třeboň to a regatta, and I slept over at Koníček’s. Vašek Vochozka was supposed to stay there too but he was at home so he slept at home. He came over and said: ‘Pecka, what are you doing?’ He addressed everyone with their surname only. I go, ‘I’m reading Stadion.’ – ‘What’s it about?’ – ‘You know, Jeriová – If I only could, I’d write it like this. She’s got the same way of thinking!’ He goes: ‘Then why don’t you write to her?’ So I did. The only letter I ever wrote in my life was to Květa. And that was it.”
“We were crazy. We did boot camps abroad before the Olympics, and we went to Boka Kotorska before Montreal. Nobody challenged anyone, yet we had to lift barbells for a total of 50 tonnes. We rowed so hard that when we had a day off, we rowed for a trip. The trips were supposed to be easy. We said, ‘Let’s go!’, and we just darted – one boat, the second, third, fourth, fifth. There are in fact three bays in Boka Kotorska, the third one leading to the sea, and we got all the way there. It was 30 kilometres, and then we had to go back; the worst thing that could happen. But we did it and nobody whined or complained. As we were almost on the high seas, there was Albania on the other side, and we had to cross it to take a shorter route back home along the Albanian shore. Approaching, we saw a guy in a fur hat with a submachine gun on his back. As we came closer, he cocked and aimed at us – and that was the best motivation because everybody rowed like their lives depended on it.”
Zdeněk Pecka was born on 6 February 1954. His parents came from South Bohemia. They moved to Litoměřice after World War II, where Zdeněk was born. The witness’s childhood was affected by an accident and lengthy treatment. Having seen the film Duel of the Titans in 1967 and watched the 1968 Olympics in Mexico, he fell for sports and started rowing. Thanks to his persistence, he made his way among the top rowers in the country and almost won a medal at the 1972 World Rowing Junior Championships in Milan. Having completed high school, he enrolled at the Faculty of Civil Engineering of the Czech Technical University and graduated successfully. He continued rowing on his own – while on the Dukla team, he was not in the military and prepared his own training plans. His effort won him and his colleagues five World Championships medals (three for a quadruple scull and two for a double skiff), out of which he values most the two bronze medals from the Olympics, Montreal 1976 and Moscow 1980. He was not allowed to take part in his third Olympics in Los Angeles in 1984 due to a boycott of the games on the part of most Soviet bloc countries. In response, he quit his rowing career and married Květa Jeriová, Olympic medallist in cross-country skiing. He worked as a coach, coaching Václav Chalupa among others. He was inducted to the Hall of Fame of the Union of Professional Coaches of the Czech Olympic Committee in 2013.
